Happy Belated Mother's Day!
What did I do today? Work. And played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. There's no way I'll beat it this weekend, but I managed to beat miniboss Dark Priest Shaft today.
Y'know. Because he's one bad mother.
Sorry.
We went comic shopping this weekend and picked up Knights of the Dinner Table, Usagi Yojimbo, Tiny Titans, Uncle Scrooge, Scott Pilgrim, a Blue Beetle trade, Wizards of Mickey, Groo, Peanuts, and Shazam. Hopefully I'll have a chance to read them soon. Also, I watched seven episodes of Batman: The Animated Series and spent a lot of time outlining You Say it First. It's been a good weekend for comics.
The new Uncle Scrooge comics are, it seems, reprints of foreign Disney comics. It gets complicated and I don't have many details, but in addition to the American comics, Disney published comics overseas. Then the American non-superhero comic market dwindled and they stopped publishing. They kept on printing in other countries. Then, apparently, they brought it back to the US, reprinting foreign stories or older American stories.
Interesting bit: I was reading Critters, an old anthology series and I thought one of the features, Gnuff, bore a more-than-passing similarity to Carl Barks' duck stories. Then I found out that the artist, Freddy Milton, drew for the Danish edition of Donald Duck.
So you're wondering...did the foreign issues include translated American stories or were they all original? How many countries had their own Disney comics? Are those $8 Uncle Scrooge paperbacks by Gemstone reprints and/or translations? Do they have the same stories?
Yeah. Those are all good questions. I have no idea.
Anyhow, I also saw The Seven Samurai. So far, I've found that I really like Akira Kurosawa movies. Not in a "I sit through this so I can act cultured around other people" kind of way, but I genuinely like it. It's three and a half hours long. It's in black & white. It's in Japanese, with subtitles. It, reportedly, invented half the stuff it does - and I suppose I could watch the action movies of the 1940s and pay attention to what they don't do, but I'm not going to. It's kind of how Bugs Bunny, when first appeared, was radically different from everything that came before him. But now, if I say "acting like a cartoon character", that's the first thing you think of. But that's not my point. Good movie. Watch it.